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It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by everything that is wrong in the world. In 2010, there were 660,000 deaths from malaria. Dire predictions about climate change suggest that sea levels could rise enough to submerge both Los Angeles and London by 2100. Bees are dying, not by the thousands but by the millions.

But what can you do? You’re just one person, right? The good news is that you *can*do something.

It’s called citizen science, and it’s a way for ordinary people like you and me to do real, honest-to-goodness, help-answer-the-big-questions science.

This book introduces you to a world in which it is possible to go on a wildlife survey in a national park, install software on your computer to search for a cure for cancer, have your smartphone log the sound pollution in your city, transcribe ancient Greek scrolls, or sift through the dirt from a site where a mastodon died 11,000 years ago—even if you never finished high school.

Part I of Be the Change: Saving the World with Citizen Science will show you what citizen science is, how important it is, and why we need more of it. You will also find out how it can personally benefit you, how you can get involved, and what it might mean to you if you did.

Part II provides a large list of projects that you can join right now, concisely explained, and organized by the level of involvement required.

Other Citizen Science Books

“A search for a radio-tagged Indiana bat roosting in the woods behind her house in New York’s Hudson Valley led Akiko Busch to assorted other encounters with the natural world – local ecological monitoring projects, community-organized cleanup efforts, and data-driven citizen science research.”

“In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery.”

“In the exploding world of citizen science, hundreds of thousands of volunteers are monitoring climate change, tracking bird migration, and following their bliss counting stardust for NASA or excavating mastodons. The sheer number of citizen scientists, combined with new technology, has begun to shape how research is conducted. Non-professionals become acknowledged experts: dentists turn into astronomers and accountants into botanists. Diary of a Citizen Scientist is a timely exploration of this phenomenon, told through the lens of nature writer Sharman Apt Russell’s yearlong study of a little-known species, the Western red-bellied tiger beetle.”